Thanks for joining me. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has urged people to work from home as the Iran war intensifies the energy crisis sweeping the globe.
The body said people should limit commuting where possible as the worldwide energy shock becomes “more and more severe”.
It released a 10 point set of actions that it said could be “implemented quickly” by governments, businesses and households.
Top of this list was a request to “work from home where possible” which “reduces fuel demand for commuting”.
It also urged governments to lower highway speed limits by at least 10 kilometres per hour to cut fuel use across both passenger vehicles and freight.
IEA executive director Fatih Birol said he hoped the list would be “of use to governments around the world, in both advanced and developing economies, in these challenging times”.
The war in the Middle East has caused the largest ever disruption to global supplies in history, the Paris-based organisation said.
Around 20 million barrels per day of crude oil and oil products typically transit the Strait of Hormuz each day but this has slowed to what the IEA called “a trickle”.
The IEA last week launched the largest ever release of global oil reserves to alleviate the crisis, totalling 400 million barrels, but it said “supply-side measures alone cannot fully offset the scale of the disruption”. Here is what you need to know.
5 things to start your day
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3) The Observer offers voluntary redundancy to all staff | Loss-making start-up warns journalists at Sunday title that job cuts could become compulsory
4) Ex-Lloyd’s of London boss ‘who had workplace affair’ misses £2m bonus | John Neal resigned then lost out on £10m-a-year job elsewhere as a result of romance claims
5) AI becomes a battleground between tech bros and the masses | Fears over jobs and an influx of data centres are turning people against billionaires’ visions of a tech utopia
What happened overnight
Oil prices gave up earlier gains as the Iran war continued, falling back to around $107 a barrel.
Oil prices had a roller-coaster day on Thursday with the Brent crude, the international standard, briefly surging to around $119 per barrel as attacks by Iran on oil and gas facilities around the Gulf escalated after Israel’s attack of Iran’s key natural gas field.
In early Friday trading, Brent crude fell following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks that he would hold off on further attacks on Iran’s gas field at the request of Donald Trump.
The retreat of oil prices helped stablize markets. South Korea’s Kospi gained 0.6pc to 5,798.23. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was closed on Friday on a holiday.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng lost 0.6pc to 25,340.43, while the Shanghai Composite index was up 0.2pc to 4,013.16.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 was down 0.5pc, while Taiwan’s Taiex was trading 0.2pc lower.
On Thursday, US stocks fell as the energy crisis continued to rock markets on the 20th day of the war.
The S&P 500 fell by 0.27pc while the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by 0.44pc and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell by 0.28pc.
Metals producers were the biggest fallers on the stock market after gold dropped by 4.94pc and aluminium fell by more than 5pc.
Shares in US gold and silver mining company Hycroft fell by 12.4pc while Century Aluminium Company plunged by 10.3pc.
